puffadder (springbok bowel stuffed with
pluck), or less exotic but delicious wild cab
bage bredie (stew), or kidneys roasted in caul.
A very special social art is that of the story
teller, and in the Marico region of the Trans
vaal, in Namaqualand, or in South-West
Africa (Namibia) old men still can hold an au
dience captive for many hours with colorful
anecdotes and hyperbolic tales of the feats or
foolishness of country heroes.
In recent years storytelling has been
brought to television by the tremendously
popular Jan Spies; he has turned into national
heroes the well-meaning country-bumpkin
son of a farmer who used a spanner to kill a
fly on his father's head, or the old man who
chiseled away the underside of a railway
bridge to let his donkeys through. Asked why
he hadn't simply dug a trench in the ground,
he pointed out that it was the donkeys' ears
that were too long, not their legs.
In other respects television -introduced in
South Africa only in 1976-has ended many
traditional forms of entertainment. The
extent to which television has mesmerized
people and broken down communication is
illustrated by a recent event in Pietersburg in
the northern Transvaal, where the body of the
elderly Mrs. Anna Bronkhorst was discovered
in front of her TV set after she had been dead
for three days. Her husband, Lourens, hadn't
even realized that she was dead.
If TV forces people indoors, it inevitably
cuts one's ties with the outdoors-and this
threatens one of the central urges in the Afri
kaners' collective consciousness, the dream
of the veld. Especially during the "hundred
years of solitude" of the trekboers in the
interior, survival for those early Afrikaners
depended on their ability to tune in to their
continent-to adjust to the rhythms of the
seasons, to face drought and flood, to read
the veld and the skies, to find medicines in
bushes and roots and bitter berries.
THEDREAM PERSISTS. In a classic
story by the early Afrikaans writer
Jan van Melle, "Oom Karel Neem
Sy Geweer Saam-Uncle Karel
Takes Along His Gun," an old
Boer on his deathbed comforts himself with
the belief that he will be allowed to take his
gun to heaven: "His life has been filled with
hunting and war. He has helped clear the
land; he's been in most of the frontier wars;
he was in every battle against the English.
How would he feel in heaven without a gun?
Surely there must be something to hunt over
there? The devil isn't dead yet. Somewhere
beyond our known world there must still be
places to be cleared; places where one would
find dangerous animals and kinds of savages
and kinds of English to fight against?"
Even the smoothest city slicker among
Afrikaners continues to cherish, deep down,
a nostalgia for the bush. Some devote their
whole life to nature. Ludwig Wagner, game
ranger in the Kruger National Park, points
out that of 22 rangers in the park only five are
of English descent; he himself has been there
for 20 years. No matter how modernized the
The Afrikaners
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